21st July 2006 Archive

The time when Google doubling profits year-over-year impressed investors has passed. The ad broker-cum-search engine today reported a surge in second quarter profits to $721m from $343m in the same period last year. As a reward, investors sent Google's shares higher a paltry one per cent in the after-hours markets.

The feds have put Silicon Valley on notice: there'd better be a damn good reason for putting the wrong date on share allocations and then hiding options from Wall Street, otherwise you're in big trouble - the kind of trouble that lands a man in jail for 20 years and costs him $5m.

A US man who fraudulently accessed the details of thousands on a credit reference database pleaded guilty this week to ID theft-related charges. Brian Dill, 33, of Simi Valley, California, claimed to be a private investigator in order to access privileged information on the Merlin Information Services database.

One good thing about being a developer these days – if real work gets too tedious there’s always a competition going to try your luck at. One of the latest is from Microsoft – the company must have a full-time department which thinks them up.

We should have known better than to abbreviate "San Francisco" to "San Fran" in our shock report earlier this week into the UK's first Masturbate-a-thon. Oh yes, and we accused the locals of sexual degeneracy, which turned out to be a bad move:

The Home Office wants to issue control orders to businesses as well as individuals. An ASBO for businesses is the central proposal of a parliamentary Green Paper from the Home Office published this week.

Microsoft has a software platform called Windows Mobile, which includes - free - an Instant Messenger client for MSN or Windows messenger. Microsoft has a research study out on IM. Mobile? Doesn't get a mention. Why so shy?

Intel yesterday played music chairs with its senior management. As CEO Paul Otellini prepared to pause the looped tape of the chip giant's infamous five-note jingle, Bill Siu and Richard Wirt, respectively head of the company's Channel Platforms Group and chief of the Software and Services Group announced their retirement, reducing the unseemly dash for seating by two.

Over the last eighteen months Salesforce.com has made a number of high profile and, more importantly, highly significant announcements as the company has rapidly developed its ability to deliver applications “on demand” to a wide community of users. This week the company has launched a Partner Relationship Management (PRM).

Nvidia has offered enthusiasts a pre-release version of Quad SLI drivers that allow two GeForce 7950 GX2 cards to work together in perfect harmony - or as near to it as beta-test software allows, at any rate.

Intel is to update its desktop Core 2 Duo-friendly P965 chipset, the chip giant informed its customers this week. The change, which will take the part from version C-1 to C-2, also affects the 946GZ and 946PL chipsets too, Reg Hardware has learned.

Expect to see even more HDMI video ports on consumer electronics kit - the organisation in charge of licensing the technology has just knocked 30 per cent off the annual admin fee it makes manufacturers pay.

A British webmaster accused of supporting terrorism was arrested in his London home on Wednesday. Syed Talha Ahsan, 26, is accused by the US of aiding and abetting the Taliban and Islamic fighters via the creation of various fund raising and propaganda websites. He's also accused of illegally possessing classified US Navy troop movement plans and providing jihadists with temporary housing in London.

Bond producers say Daniel Craig will play 007 in a second film slated for a May 2008 release, the BBC reports, despite widespread outrage among diehard fans who questioned the blond actor's suitability for the role.

"Whew," the PFY says wiping the tears from his eyes as he steps into Mission Control. "I don't think I've laughed so much since you slapped an old scanner one top of our shredder and convinced on of the Bosses that it was a self-feeding photocopier."

Dell's December 2005 battery recall followed the recording of dozens of incidents over a two-year period of overheating notebooks, many resulting in melted or burned computers, it has been alleged this week as the company continues to investigate the case of a laptop that burst into flames in Japan.

Samsung yesterday showed off what it calls a "free folder" phone - a handset that can not only open up vertically, clamshell-fashion but can fold out horizontally the way devices like Nokia's Communicator do.

LG this week launched a bid to get 3G network 3's customers downloading music - and scratch-mixing the stuff afterward. Punters can even listen to tracks using wireless headphones or out loud through the built-in stereo speakers.

A US federal court has ruled that a repair firm did not violate the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in performing maintenance on tape backup systems from StorageTek. The decision, reversing the court's earlier ruling, came after an appeal court told the lower court to review its injunction against Custom Hardware.

Anyone planning to buy a hardcore gaming laptop will almost certainly have Alienware on their list of possible suppliers. Casual gamers and mainstream users might be put off by the machines' let alone the price, so Alienware's assembled the more mid-range Area 51 m5500. It doesn’t look as dull as your average laptop and offers a solid set of gaming-friendly features...

Not surprisingly, Sun’s response to the recent report from analyst Richard Monson Haefel of The Burton Group, which suggested that Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) was effectively under a death sentence born of its over-complexity, have erred towards the dismissive.

At one time, the future of mobiles looked simple. The smartphone was a new kind of gadget that was subsuming the pager, the camera, the PDA, the Walkman, and almost every other iece of technology you could carry - and offering it in volume at an irresistible price. Often free. Over time, every phone would become a smartphone.

It used to take HP about two days, ten executives and 20,000 words to near a coherent explanation of the Adaptive Enterprise. Thankfully, the company has put that ugly past behind it and can now describe its overarching strategy in a quick, palatable fashion.